New online encyclopedia to catalog all the world’s species

A new effort to catalog all 1.8 million species out there appears to have …

The latest effort to create an expert-curated wiki-style information source is being announced this morning, with a goal that may dwarf many previous ones: providing information on all 1.8 million species on Earth that we're currently aware of. Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL), a massive project with the goal of providing both scientists and the public a glimpse into this planet's biodiversity. There are a number of reasons to think that this project may be successful despite its scale, but it faces many of the same difficulties that other efforts of this sort have faced.

We'll start with the advantages. The EoL effort was kicked off by one of the foremost biologists in business, E. O. Wilson of Harvard. Wilson received a TED prize and, in his acceptance speech, called for the creation of a database containing information on every species on Earth. Members of the web branding and marketing firm Avenue A|Razorfish were in the audience and agreed to work with Wilson towards this goal. Work for the EoL kicked off last year.

The EoL has been able to attract what appears to be an unprecedented level of support, both scientifically and financially. Key institutions in the project include the Field Museum, Harvard, the Smithsonian, and the Marine Biological Lab at Woods Hole. At least 10 museums and libraries have committed to digitizing their collections as a contribution to the EoL. Their steering committee, advisory board, and institutional council include an international all-star lineup of biologists. In short, the EoL has no shortage of expertise and institutional resources. On the money end, the effort is being backed to the tune of $12.5 million coming from two of the biggest charities in the US: the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations.

All the money and experts in the world, however, can't keep the EoL from facing the same suite of problems as other wiki-like efforts: integrating and validating information from diverse sources, presenting vast amounts of data to users in a functional manner, and gaining the momentum required to keep the efforts from going stale.

The institutional support, however, can certainly help with the first of these issues. Most major research institutions have been working on digitizing their internal resources, which means that much of the backing information needed to get EoL started is already available in electronic form. Presumably, this data is largely accurate as well. As long as the institutions commit to ensuring that their internal resources remain accessible to the EoL moving forward, the encyclopedia should contain broader and more detailed information as it becomes available.

The scope of information contained in the encyclopedia has presented a serious challenge to other efforts at gathering comprehensive scientific datasets. Balancing ease of navigation, readability, and access to all available data has resulted in some awkward compromises (for an example, see the Mouse Genome Informatics site). Here, the partnership with an experienced web firm appears to have paid off, at least based on the twosample pages that are currently displayed. Unfortunately, those pages are not currently functional, so it's difficult to say if the structure works well in practice.

The final issue, whether the EoL can build the sort of momentum (in terms of usage and contributions) that Wikipedia has, is the most difficult to evaluate at this point. The EoL has certainly attracted all the right people and institutions, but how that works out as things progress will be the key test. It's entirely possible that some of the people involved will treat their positions as honorary titles, and institutions will interpret their role as providing access to resources rather than helping to integrate them.

Money may prove to be a challenge as well; the contributions from the two foundations are meant as seed money. The EoL will be expected to attract the funds necessary for long-term operation on its own. The big names involved will help in obtaining money from private foundations, but the effort is coming at a time when government science funding is generally at or below inflation, which may limit the cash available in the future.

So, will it work? The high profile and significant support for this effort would lead me to say yes. Many of my remaining doubts about its success appear in the questions on the project's FAQ page. Unfortunately, the answers to them appear maddeningly vague, suggesting that, although the EoL recognizes many of the difficulties it will face, it hasn't determined a clear way of solving them.